|
F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
The Ironies of Grace
By Mark P. Shea
|
This Rock
Volume 13, Number 5
 May-June 2002 
|
|
|
It’s an exhilarating and strange thing for a chubby suburbanite like me to find I am a dangerous man, but somebody named Robert M. Zins, Th.M. has deduced that I am. He has written an exciting expose of me called "The Marketing of Merit in the Roman Catholic Religion," published in a journal called Theo~Logical. (For those of you with web browsers, it can be found at www.cwrc-rz.org/newsletters/2q96zinsotd.htm.)
As should be obvious from the name of his ministry, Mr. Zins is pretty certain Catholics are not Christian. He is also, judging from his article, certain that I am a Bad Person:
I show "to what depth a Roman apologist will go to make palatable his religion in the hopes of marketing it as Christianity."
I "seek to divert attention away from the facts."
I am "clever in the mixing and matching of [my] terms."
I "dress up" Catholic teaching.
I "attempt to avert our eyes away from Christ alone for justification."
I am "teaching the same old heresies when it comes to salvation."
I am "using popular language in hopes of beguiling the uncareful."
I prompt Zins to declare, "Whether it be the articulate and careful garb of the Council of Trent or the witty, whimsical attire of twentieth-century pop theologians"—that’d be me—"the finery of Rome is as filthy rags compared to the garment of holiness in Christ alone."
But most sinister of all, says Zins, "Mr. Shea closes his article with this dreadful conclusion: ‘Under the guidance of the Spirit it is really possible for Catholics and Evangelicals to say, concerning faith and merit, "How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity."’"
All this because I said (in my piece "The Meaning of Merit," This Rock, October 1995, which you can see online at http://www.mark-shea.com/merit.html) that the Catholic concept of "merit" means what Paul said when he told the Galatians that if you sow to the Spirit you shall reap of the Spirit (Gal. 6:7), and that Evangelicals believe Galatians 6:7, so they ultimately believe the concept of "merit" though they refer to it by names like "fruitfulness."
That’s it. I am "dreadful" because I said there’s not a reason in the world for Catholics and Evangelicals to fight over the idea of merit and that I thought this was a good thing.
I cannot for the life of me see why this provokes the ire of Mr. Zins. Nor does he, in the length and breadth of his article, help me to understand why. Rather, he seems intent on proving that Catholics deny the need of God’s grace for salvation and quotes bits of the Council of Trent that he hopes prove his point. Yet, after straining at these gnats, he swallows a camel by overlooking the first canon on Justification from the Council of Trent:
"If any one saith that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema."
This canon says as strenuously as does Zins that it is impossible to be saved without the grace of God through Jesus Christ. Yet Mr. Zins overlooks it in his zeal to arrive at the forceful conclusion that really, anyway, it is a "dreadful" thing that Evangelicals and Catholics should agree on something.
Indeed, so passionate does Zins become on the central significance of Grace that he is moved to quote Paul on my account and write, "In the final analysis, ‘what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols?’"
What fascinates me here is the curious way such rhetoric attacks Catholics in the name of grace and even resents the prospect that grace-filled Evangelical Christians should behave graciously toward Catholics.
Grace, after all, is defined among Evangelicals as "unmerited favor." Many of them behave as though this means something, and so they treat their Catholic brothers and sisters with a lovely and gratuitous charity as they work together to further the aims of the gospel. Most Catholics do the same—as their Church bids them to do.
But a small (though not insignificant) number of Christians like Mr. Zins—and those in other organizations such as Alpha Omega Ministries, Christians Evangelizing Catholics, Mission to Catholics, Lumen Productions, and so forth—denounce this charity among Christians as somehow constituting weak-kneed Evangelicalism and sinister "Romanist" subterfuge that denies grace.
And so we get the peculiar spectacle of certain Christians announcing God’s unmerited favor and following through on this proclamation by laboring to condemn and accuse fellow Christians who dogmatically affirm the absolute necessity of grace for salvation. What could be the rationale for this unusual way of expressing faith in God’s unmerited favor?
One popular explanation is that there is much in the Catholic communion that is ugly, sinful, and bad—something the Holy Father has himself pointed out in the preparations that led up to the Jubilee Year. When I was an Evangelical contemplating becoming Catholic back in 1987, one of the issues that confronted me was the long history of Catholic sins. Bizarre practices, Mafiosi, sleazy clerics, murderers, ignoramuses, and wahoos in general have never been lacking in the Catholic communion. Why, I wondered, should I throw my lot in with such a people as this with all their scuzzy problems?
In a word: grace. "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst," said Paul to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:15). So what made me think I was qualified somehow to separate myself from the mass of great sinners and take my cold and distant place among the elite pure?
The whole point of the motley communion called Catholicism is, "You can pick your friends but you are stuck with your family." Of course Catholics have sinned. That's the whole point of the gospel, isn’t it? And grace is precisely what God grants to forgive sins—as Trent dogmatically affirms.
Yet here are curious Christians like Mr. Zins who use grace as a sort of code word to condemn Catholics and their Evangelical "fellow travelers." The doctrine of "unmerited favor" apparently bids them to extend unmerited disfavor to Christians who believe in grace as strongly as they do. Indeed, they are impelled to go further and condemn Catholics for their phantom "denial of grace" no matter how often Catholics re-affirm the teaching of Trent’s canon one on justification—and no matter how obvious it is that Catholics, like all Christians, believe in Christ as their savior.
So adamant is their insistence that a believing Catholic cannot be Christian it must be shored up with the insistence that Catholics cannot even be honestly mistaken. We must be out to "beguile the uncareful," not speak in good faith of things we actually think true. And what compels these people to take such a dark view of their fellow Christians is—grace?
What’s ironic about this is that the Catholic Church—which allegedly denies the grace such Christians profess to proclaim—teaches of all the validly baptized Mr. Zinses not that they are a temple of idols nor agents of Belial. Rather the Church holds that "it remains true that all who have been justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church" (Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism 1:3).
The Decree says of the rifts in Christendom that "often enough, men of both sides were to blame." It "humbly beg[s] pardon of God and of our separated brethren, just as we forgive them that trespass against us" (11:7). It exhorts Catholics to "pray to the Holy Spirit for the grace to be genuinely self-denying, humble, gentle in the service of others and to have an attitude of brotherly generosity." It fosters prayer for, encouragement of, cooperation with, and esteem of our non-Catholic Christian brethren—even those who deny Catholics the name Christian.
This sounds to me very much like grace. But more than sounding like grace, it acts like it.
Mark P. Shea is a popular writer and lecturer for Catholic Answers Seminars. His most recent book is Making Senses of Scripture. He writes from Mountlake Terrace, Washington.
|
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
[TOP]
